A method is the system of conventions, specifications, skills, and policies that governs how work is conducted. Method describes how things should be done. Practice is the actual doing. Method is the score; practice is the performance.

Four properties make something a method:

Codification. A method is documented — as specifications, policies, skills, or other explicit artifacts. Uncodified habit is not method. A team that “just knows how to do it” has practice but not method. Method begins when the practice is written down, and it becomes method when the documentation is treated as governing rather than merely descriptive.

Coherence. A method’s parts relate to each other as a system, not as an ad-hoc collection of rules. A coding style guide, a deployment checklist, and a review policy that are written independently and never reconciled are three documents, not a method. A method integrates its parts — each convention, specification, and policy is aware of the others.

Prescriptiveness. A method says how things should be done, not merely how they are done. An ethnographic description of a team’s work habits is an account of practice, not a method. A method makes claims about what the right way to work is. It can be wrong — but it takes a position.

Revisability. A method can be changed when it no longer serves the work’s objectives. A method that cannot be revised is a ritual. Revisability does not mean the method changes casually — it means the method has an explicit or implicit process for its own amendment. The method governs practice; but practice can reveal that the method needs to change.

Method without practice is shelfware — documentation that nobody follows. Practice without method is improvisation — effective in the hands of experts, unreproducible otherwise. The productive tension between the two is where organized work lives: method constrains practice, practice tests method, and the gap between them is where learning happens.

A methodology is a particular named approach to work (Scrum, Shape Up, Kanban, PMBOK). A method may draw on multiple methodologies. A methodology is a package; a method is the actual system a particular endeavor uses, assembled from whatever sources serve it.